What is Observability?

Observability means is the ability to infer internal states of  a system based on the system external outputs. Observability is a system or process by observing the external visible information.  In the IT World use of the software delivery process, Observability and monitoring have become a significant term, when you’re discuss about software development. Observability is the method for evaluating output to reach meaningful conclusion about internal states of the systems. Observability must have the right data to help you get answers to known and unknown problems in production. 

What is Monitoring?

The monitoring is the process of monitor action which tools and process can describe the performance, health, and relevant characteristics of system internal states, IT monitoring refers specially to the process of translating infrastructure log metrics data in to meaningful and actionable insights. Monitoring is the actual task of collecting and displaying this data, monitoring, track performance, identify problems and anomalies, monitoring is the best practices with an effective operability solution can both correlations between metric data and log data, machine learning can be used to detect, analyze, and provide insight. Monitoring is crucial for analyzing long-term trends, for building dashboards, and for alerting.

What types of monitoring work?

• Problem Detection: it let you know the problems, by alerting, or seeing issues on dashboards especially performance issues, identify the cause of the error, and apply appropriate solutions before significant damage to uptime and revenue.

• Problem Resolution: after knowing the problem, the root cause, and troubleshooting.
• Continuous Improvement: by all these, capacity planning, financial planning, trending, performance engineering, reporting we can improve the software delivery process. IT Ops teams can measure user behavior on the network using event logs and use that information to optimize the customer experience and direct users to their desired tasks and activities more efficiently.

Comparing observability and monitoring

You need to be monitoring to have observability. Monitoring can view the external, logging can see the outputs over time, and with these combined, observability can be achieved by inferring the internal based on the historical. Observability and monitoring complement each other, with each one serving a different purpose. 

Monitoring tells you when something is wrong, while observability enables you to understand why. Monitoring is a subset of and key action for observability. You can only monitor a system that’s observable.

In this video you can see more information about Observability & Monitoring.